"Siren Song Alert"– Nissan North America Selects i2 Solutions to Help Enable Business Agility

To be clear, I am *NOT* endorsing i2 as a “lean” tool. “Business Agility”? What is that?

“It is built on the principles of lean manufacturing and constraint-based planning, to get the best throughput and customer service levels at the lowest inventory level and cost.”

Really? Lean manufacturing principles? Which one(s) exactly? This reminds of the “Siren Song” article I linked to just the other day.

Does anyone have experience with this type of software as a “lean” tool? I've seen the i2 Factory Planner software at work, in great detail, and didn't find anything “lean” about it. For one, the software assumed a single, fixed capacity for a workcenter (a cell or a line). Any lean environment will have multiple capacity options, adding or removing operators to most closely match takt time. I never saw i2 do anything like that.